Step One - Sell House. Done.

For us the first step on the journey to retirement, well first after telling our employers and co-workers that is, was selling our house in Nashville.  Nashville is currently considered to be a pretty “hot” market for real estate and our house is in a well-established, close-in (read “desirable”) neighborhood.

 

It sold in two weeks, which was a bit faster than we had expected.  We have 44 days to be out of the house.  But 83 days until the date we told our employers we would be out of their houses.  So now we are faced with three projects – downsizing, packing the things we are going to keep, and finding a place to live for the 39 days we will need to be in Nashville before decamping to North Carolina.   I fear we may have bitten off more than we can chew, but there is no going back now.  The offer we accepted on the house was a fair offer with no contingencies and no requests for us to upgrade anything.  Turns out the buyer is planning on gutting a lot of the inside (??? The house is only 11 years old.  Whatever.) 

I’ve been checking out the properties on Airbnb as a possible solution for our gap housing needs.  One of the big issues, wherever we try to stay, is going to be our two dogs, Jasmine and Freddy.

Jasmine

Freddy

Somehow I’m not much of a fan of small dogs, so our two are a 72 pound Rottweiler and a 45 pound German Short-haired Pointer . Turns out on Airbnb you can filter for “Pets Allowed”.  That’s a good starting point.  That filter alone took the available properties down by about 90%.  So now to do a little messaging with the “hosts” of some likely properties.